Rating: 12/20
Plot: An airline crash investigator tries to figure out what happened with a mysterious crash during which the co-pilot reported the bodies of the passengers were burned up before the catastrophe. Turns out that time travel is involved.
The premise is intriguing, and there's a real sense of mystery with this story since it's nothing you've really seen before. There are budget concerns which can be forgiven and storytelling concerns which really can't, and there's a goofiness here, like the movie couldn't make up its mind if it wanted to be a 1980's movie or not. There's a weird-looking plane tragedy opener with crash test dummies and lots of explosions. Things then slow down for a bit while Kris Kristofferson tries to decide whether or not he wants a cup of coffee. And then, once we hit the future, we get characters like this robot
which has human mouth and eyeballs and is about as funny as C3PO. For example, this conversation:
Person: Your mother was a cash register.
Creepy Assed Robot: But she turned a tidy profit.
Those lines shouldn't be in any movie. You also have this wheelchaired character
who seemed to be in charge for reasons that either weren't explained very well or were explained when I wasn't paying attention. And then there's a handful of elderly people, who might actually be in charge rather than Gray Wheelchair Man, in these tubes. One of them looks like this
and seems like she should be in an episode of Doctor Who instead of a movie. The future stuff is more strange than interesting, and the body-snatching plot, although it does allow for a nifty visual where bewildered plane passengers watch their doppelgangers walk past them, never made a lot of sense to me. Of course, when you give your goofy robot with a human mouth and eyeballs a last line like "It is not the end. It is not the beginning of the end. It is the end of the beginning," then maybe you're not all that interested in making sense anyway.
One thing I did like, probably because I'm a sucker for this when I see it in movies, is when you see the same series of scenes from a different character's perspective. Cheryl Ladd's future person meets up with Kris Kristofferson's present person, and we don't really know what's going on the first time we see it. We're just supposed to buy that Cheryl Ladd and Kris Kristofferson are compatible. I mean, don't get me wrong. If Kris Kristofferson came to my house and asked me to sleep with him, I'd do it. You know, because of Convoy. How could I pass up the chance? But it seems like an odd pairing to me. When we see that series of scenes the second time, more from Ladd's point of view, it all clicks, and there's some humor that works well.
This movie has, perhaps, the finest moment of Kristofferson's career, by the way. It's a scene where he's dicking around with some kind of tool and gets himself zapped. It's good stuff.
Things really get gross at the end. Things turn orange, Kristofferson and Ladd make out in front of a professor, and somebody winds up pregnant. The orange confuses, but maybe not as much as the way this movie tries to deal with paradoxes. If somebody could explain that to me, I'd appreciate it.
Anyway, despite the flaws, this isn't a bad B-movie. It has the feel of a made-for-television movie, but it's got an interesting concept, a handful of neat scenes, and an attractive female lead. And Kris Kristofferson, a guy who wouldn't have starred in a bad movie.
No comments:
Post a Comment